"Returns" is narrated by the ghost of a man who finds that his frustrating inability to spur his grieving lover to care for their pet cat crystallizes the emotional shortfall that distinguished their relationship. "Do You Love Your Wife?" tells of a man who sees his crumbling relationship with his lover mirrored in a cryptic violent nightmare.
, etc.), the 19 stories in this collection reveal his skill at crafting short and subtle mood pieces about everyday folk who find themselves wrestling with overpowering emotions that occasionally open them to macabre experience. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.Though Stoker-winner Ketchum is best known for his novels of hardcore horror ( Off Season (Oct.)Ĭopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Anyone who enjoys fine, hard horror will appreciate this novel, at last available in hardcoverAhere, in a signed limited edition likely to sell out quickly. Here, too, Ketchum writes with economy and power, in sentences that tighten like noose wire. As in Off Season, the action is ultraviolent and shocking, but the point here, as there, isn't the grue but the spirit of those who must deal with it. The game soon turns frightening, then deadly, as the four encounter the house's horrid inhabitants, not all humanAa challenge that prompts Dan and others to grow up quickly. In it, the quartet agrees to play hide-and-seek in a local haunted house. The book's second part provides the payoff to that meandering but tantalizing setup. In the first, the narrator, local young man Dan, meets visiting college kids Casey, Kim and Steven engages in some drinking and daring with them falls for beautiful, wild Casey (they have sex in a graveyard) and learns what impels her to take risks: years ago, she was sexually abused by her fatherAabuse that led to the death of her younger brother. Set during summer in the Maine coastal town of Dead River, the book divides into two parts. That's a shame, not only because Mayr's career nose-dived commercially after that (though he's still writing and publishing), but because Hide and Seek is a good novel, strong and true, scary yet uplifting in the classic horror manner. Perhaps because of the outrage the book engendered, Ketchum's second novel, Hide and Seek, received little support from its publisher when it appeared in mass market in 1984. In the early 1980s, Ketchum (the pseudonym of Dallas Mayr) published in paperback as gruesome and taut a horror novel as anyone had seen: Off Season.
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